1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to video systems, and, more particularly, to media distribution and consumption within home and mobile entertainment environments.
2. Related Art
In wide spread use, media players each include one or both of a video display and corresponding sound system. Media players take the form of portable and stationary devices such as analog and digital televisions, computers, pocket televisions, cell phones, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), projectors, portable audio players, portable game units and digital watches, for example.
Such media players use a wide variety of industry standard video and audio formats such as NTSC (National Television Systems Committee), PAL (Phase Alternation Line), VGA (Video Graphics Array), QVGA (Quadrature Video Graphics Array) and HDTV (High Definition TeleVision). Other media players employ unique, proprietary audio and/or video format requirements. For example, to provide a particular service, some media players might require a proprietary screen resolution, refresh, frame rate and video/audio encoding and compression techniques that are only supported by a single or several manufacturers.
Various systems, hereinafter “media sources”, provide the media to the media players for presentation to a viewer/listener. Media sources include cable, fiber, and satellite Set-Top-Boxes (STBs), Digital Video Disk (DVD) players, Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), computers, game consoles, wireless radio and television broadcasters, Internet servers, etc. The media sources provide a wide variety of media programming, both live and pre-recorded, that may be presented to a user via the media players.
There are many variables in delivery of a media program from a media source to a media player such as channel conditions (available data transfer rate, for example), recipient media audio and video characteristics, and the user preferences at the recipient device's end. The media programs thus served consume same amount of data transfer rate irrespective of the variations in the above-mentioned variables.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention.